Athletes with long careers spanning into their 40s used to be an anomaly. But in the recent decade, stars like LeBron James and Tom Brady have proven that age really is nothing more than a number. Athletes can extend the longevity of their careers come down to a better understanding of how to optimise the body through carefully curated diets, balancing rest time and a science-backed approach to recovery.
Armed with these tools, professional coaches like Josh Bonhotal, former assistant strength and condition coach for the Chicago Bulls and vice president of performance of personalised training app Future, can help athletes hone their skills and fine-tune their bodies to ensure healthy, fruitful and long careers.
Bonhotal says that more than ever, athletes are taking care of their bodies as much off-field as they are on. Gone are the days when players indulge in the party lifestyle. Even the likes of professional skateboarders, who in the previous generation are known to dabble in unhealthy lifestyle habits, have now turned to strict clean diets to stay physically fit.
NBA players like Klay Thompson, Chris Paul and the late Kobe Bryant are known to steer clear of alcohol as part of their health routine. Bonhotal says it comes down to a better understanding of both physical and mental wellness and their impact on performance. “Much more attention and care are being placed on lifestyle factors and what’s happening away from the court. In particular, much more education is occurring around sleep, nutrition, and stress management.”
With greater resources put into nutrition, stress management and recovery, Bonhotal says teams are building environments around players where good habits can happen.
Here, he shares four essential factors that help athletes develop long, fruitful careers.
Nutrition
Several teams have moved from catered meals to recreate farm-to-table style restaurants inside their practice facility, where all ingredients in every dish are locally sourced, organic and precise to individual player needs and dietary preferences. [Players are cutting out] sugars, processed foods – instead, everything is high in nutritional value with antioxidants and anti-inflammatory.
As part of this, teams are now hiring not just one but multiple chefs as salaried employees, whereas before, meals were catered at best and less about proper fuelling and more about just feeding. Meals, snacks, and supplements are being provided for players everywhere they go and even to take home, leaving much less room or reason for players to eat anything other than what’s being prepared by team chefs under the guidance of team dietitians.
Sleep
In the past, teams mainly dealt with the late nights and rigours of NBA travel as “part of it”. Nowadays, time zone changes, time in the air and late nights are all accounted for and often individually tracked via wearables such as Oura Rings to more precisely dial in training and practice schedules beyond even the group, down to what’s optimal at the individual level.
Additionally, you’re now seeing teams more regularly staying the night after a road game to prioritise a good night’s rest. Ten years ago, you would always hop on a flight back home or to the next city immediately after the game, which typically meant an arrival time between 2 and 4 am.
Lastly, several teams are shifting their practice and shootaround times to take place in the early afternoon and allow players to maximise their sleep as opposed to being up early for a 10 am shootaround or 11 am practice, which for many players means arriving at the facility around 8 or 9 am.
Stress management
When a player struggles on the court, one of the first places you look at is what’s happening off the court. In recognising this, teams have begun to employ more staff members focused on alleviating and handling any off-court stresses as much as possible for each player so they can focus solely on their training, games, and recovery.
Additionally, you’re now seeing a much greater commitment to mental performance and health services. Several teams even have multiple staff members in this area who may work with players on a near-daily basis, helping them with everything from building confidence, overcoming doubts and fears, and empowering them to manage anxiety and negative stressors more effectively.
This work alone can have a massive impact not just on their in-game performance but on their overall recovery as it can help to facilitate a positive hormonal state (e.g. minimising stress hormones like cortisol) and create a virtuous cycle with other lifestyle factors such as better sleep, increased willpower to make better nutritional choices and more energy for workouts.
Training and recovery
Nearly everything players are doing these days is being tracked objectively via wearables and other technology and subjectively via things like daily wellness questionnaires. Training loads from practice and games can be measured both externally (stress to the muscles and joints) and internally (stress to the cardiovascular system).
With all of this available information, performance coaches can be much more precise in prescribing training exercises, intensity, and volume to optimise based upon where the player is at on the given day instead of guessing.
In essence, performance coaches are better able to hit the moving target with each player day by day rather than making group decisions. As a result, you see more players adopting a micro-dosing approach when it comes to training through lifting weights and conditioning, to where they train more frequently–sometimes every single day–but in small doses (10 to 30-minute training sessions five to seven times a week as opposed to 30 to 60-minute training sessions two to three times a week).
Many of the above factors can also apply to everyday people and their training and fitness goals, which we try to instil at Future. From the outset of the coach-client relationship, Future coaches identify the person’s fitness and health goals and then address those through workouts, nutrition, sleep and stress relief if needed.
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